Stripping Down osCommerce...

[Guest]

For any of you experts out there...

 

I am developing a site right now that will utilize osCommerce *only* for its catalog ability. We have written a custom ordering and account process to interface with a recurring billing solution (ubermisth.com).

 

We want to keep the admin side to manage the catalog, as well as the front end code for the catalog and shopping cart. However, we are anticipating this site to be of extremely heavy traffic and would like to strip down all of the extra db calls, logging, called up functions, etc. that we won't be using (so we can be lean and mean!). Has anybody done this and have any recommendations or does a true expert want to be paid to help me with this?

 

Thanks for any ideas / advice / feedback.

 

-Zac

[Christian Lescuyer]

Most of the unused functions can be removed by editing the column_left.php and column_right.php.

 

As the code is written, whole parts of the code will not be executed if the corresponding option in admin is off. Eg, all the download logic is contained within

if (DOWNLOAD_ENABLED == 'true') { }

sections.

 

Of course, the whole file is still read and precompiled by the server. I would say it's not "lean and mean", just efficient.

 

Also, Harald wrote the whole system to be readable and adaptable. For a production system, you could consider a "compressor" that would strip all comments and whitespace.

[Guest]

I have done this very thing on one of my sites. It's quite an in-depth task and not recommended for the faint of heart.

If you do this, make sure you do a backup of the files you modify and change one thing at a time and check each time that the pages load properly.

You can start by opening your index.php and looking at the other files it calls.

Go to each file and see what all it loads, etc, etc.

Then determine which functions are not needed.

Then, if you delete files or tables, you can remove the entry from database_tables.php and filenames.php.

And if you ever decide to restore those things you removed, be aware that it is easier to just backup the database, reinstall osCommerce, then restore the database.